About half of the 512 is free with everything running, and I have just changed my pagefile to 512 min and max as per TEG site. Thanks!
Get a decent nat/spi hardware firewall (router) even if you only run one machine and dump software firewalls (zone alarm). Bump mem up to 1gig. That should clean up a lot.
Roscoe - Doubt it's the OS - have both XP and W2K running on multiple machines with more going on them than you listed and NEVER have to reboot them. Suggest you: 1. Make sure you have the latest firmware updates installed - have seen notes on hardware generated problems with machines using the AMD chips and certain MBs and certain video cards that produce hung processes, intermittent crashes, spurious memory management issues, etc. 2. Verify that you have the very latest updates installed for all drivers, apps, and system software 3. See if any of the software (zone alarm, etc.) use privileged code (e.g., their own drivers, kernel mode services, etc.) - such code can cause all kinds of sporadic problems if there are any bugs 4. Dump the firewall software and use hardware - it's cheap and works better and there's no way for it to screw up your PC if it's outboarded Good luck.
I second that - get rid of the Zonealarm, use the build in firewall from XP, had conflicts no end there using a third party. Then in addition use an external hardware firewall. Have been running Xp over a year now, only shut down once a week for backup (laptop) and never had a problem.
Watch out for drivers. Make sure they are all certified. Used to be the biggest problem in Windows was drivers. Like everybody else, I can attest that XP when properly setup on decent gear and software works well. TS4 could well have a nasty resource leak (or seven). That was made when what? Win95 was out? Win95 couldn't run for x hours due to a counter issue (that crashed when it rolled over, it counted seconds since last reboot), right? Basically, if you have a memory leak (ie, memory gets used up and never freed), you should do a step-by-step process to find out what app is being bad. Perhaps you should just fire up the PC, with no extra apps running and surf the web for a day. Then check mem usage. If it's fine, it's likely not the drivers or the OS, but one of your apps. Then it's a simple process to figure out which one (just run one at a time, and see what eats the memory).
Thanks for all the great feedback, I really appreciate it. FWIW the attached pic (I hope it works) shows the number of processes running - I count 26 in there, and I can account for 12 of them (one being the app used to take the screenshot) so I am assuming that the remainder are all system processes. Does that seem about 'normal' in the experience of the group? I'm now checking all of my drivers. Roscoe
Hey Folks: I have had more than my share of virus, trojans, worms, etc. At this point I am thinking of buying a Mac G4 or G5 and running it using an emulation program. It has been a long time since I used Mac machines, so I am wondering if this is a viable solution? Any comments? Thanks, steve46
buy a hardware firewall. I use a Cisco Pix along with Mcaffe on every pc in my network and have yet to have a single outage in over 2 years of trading full time.... knock on wood
Help! My PC is toast. I had the explorer problem detailed in other posts here wherein an "invalid syntax" shows up as the window title. After trying anything and everything, nothing seems to work but now it does'nt even open anymore, I just get a window that says invalid iexplore.exe... In addition, I get the windows installer opening up 1,2 even 3 instances of it as if it wants to install something. Sorta reminds me of that movie about a car called "Christine" by Stephen King.. When I re-installed win 2K it initially asks me for a "clean" or "repair".I tried repair, no success then clean.. Now when I boot up the PC, it presents me with 2 win 2K OS choices. If I pick the old win 2K -smae old problem. If I pick new OS, it hands at Windows starrtup screen. Any suggestions on how I can really start fresh so I only see the new clean install. Obviously, I'd rather not reformat the drive coz I still have data in it. Thanks